FILMOGRAPHY Arrows
Terminals
Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1984, 16mm, colour, 15 min
Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1986, 16mm, colour, 20 min
Alison Fox played the dulcimer. Sylvia Plath read her poem “The Thin People”. Thanks to the women that replied to a letter about anorexia in Feminist Art News and the Women’s Therapy Centre. Made at St. Martin’s School of Art.
With Frankie Earnshaw, Inge Lahire [Madsen], Maria McMahon, Cathy Morley, Kate Novaczek. Sound effects: Inge Lahire [Madsen]. Clarinet: Giora Feidman. Contact: Zohl de Ishtar (Women Working for a Nuclear free and Independent Pacific)
Arrows uses a combination of live action and rostrum work to communicate the experience of anorexia and to analyse the cultural causes of the condition. “I am so aware of my body,” we are told on the soundtrack, whilst images of caged wild birds are intercut with images of the rib cage of the film’s subject, the filmmaker herself. Taking the camera into her own hands, and revealing this process to the spectator by using a mirror, the filmmaker shows herself in control of this representation of a woman’s body. The film ends with Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Thin People” which speaks of people who starve themselves, and people who are actually deprived, locating the condition of anorexia firmly in Western patriarchal culture. (LUX)
Terminals exposes women’s corporeal vulnerability to techno-patriarchal culture through a filmic exploration of the working conditions of female workers at nuclear power stations. Voices of women describe their heightened exposure to the risks of lung cancer, miscarriage, Down syndrome or neurological damage, while deeply affecting images and sounds attempt to give tangible form to this intangible threat. Echoing the way that the nuclear workers’ bodies are harmed by exposure to radiations, the filmstrip is constantly overexposed, burned to the point of the image’s near-disappearance. (programme notes for From Reel to Real, Tate Modern 2016) The “work faster” ethic is written on the door to the terminals. Hazards to fertility or risks of cancer are not criteria in setting “acceptable” levels of exposure to radiation at work. At the Visual Display Terminal, women are staring directly at a source of radiation. Bomb tests and waste disposal are the white man’s cancer imposed on the people of the Pacific. (Sandra Lahire)
Edge Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1986, 16mm, colour, 12 min Synthetiser and sung by Kate Bradley War and violence against women in videos and on the news. This short, named after Sylvia Plath’s last poem, is about the woman who is a daughter; icy, perfected and petrified for the patriarchy. She is also a mother drawing her two children with her into this death-in-life. Edge is the irony, which is the poet’s defiance. And it is the blade… how far can those controllers go with their instruments and armaments and still act as though our pieces and feelings can be stuck together again? There is no illusion of the woman’s “resistance”. Yet in this theme of woman as medical and war guinea-pig the silent scream becomes audible in lines of poetry and song. (Sandra Lahire)
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Plutonium Blonde Sandra Lahire United Kingdom, 1987, 16mm, colour, 16 min With Maria McMahon. Andy Ironside — use of studio at “Diverse Reports”. Voices of Rachel, Sarah, Stephen Knight and Mark Sheehan. Sound: Arne Nordheim. Help & advice: Inge Garner Lahire [Madsen], Mary Samuels, Socialist Environment Association, Noski Deville, Tina Keane. Part of a trilogy of films on radiation, this dystopic collage frames the fractured narrative of Thelma, a woman working with the monitors in a plutonium reactor. Plutonium blonde, a color reference usually used in beauty products, becomes the reality of the female body in the chemical factory. Through phonic collages of casual conversations and children’s lullabies that are disrupted by the fumes of factories and the threat of a nuclear war, Sandra Lahire’s film confronts
Living on air
